Bamboo Tips - Tips Area
Rod Design - Plotting Tapers

< Home < Tips Area < Rod Design < Plotting Tapers

While plotting rod tapers in Excel of Young, Powell, Payne, Leonard as well as many tapers from current makers which have been posted in The Planing Form a common trend is showing up.

When you put in the number for the rod tapers and plot them on a graph you can quickly see what the rod looks like. You can overlay any other rod makers numbers and see how the tapers compare to each other. What is fun to see is how many of the old makers as well as current makers share the same tapers.

It is apparent how original Powell, Payne and Young were at coming up with their taper designs. And I have seen some rodmakers who have come up with the same taper either by design or just accident.

On of the benefits of plotting the actual taper is you can graph you favorite tapers and compare others to it seeing how they are similar or contrast. You very quickly can pick out the design ideas that you want when designing a rod. One of the benefits is you can measure over the varnish and plot the taper. Then when you see the taper you can adjust any obvious goofs and decrease the numbers for the size line you want to use.

I guess it is true that their are no new tapers, only new names for tapers.  (Adam Vigil)

It's also quite easy to do in RodDNA.  And you can overlay charts of different rods within the software.  (Mark Wendt)

Frank Stetzer's online Hexrod has a very slick comparison function too. In addition, it is easy to copy the values to a spreadsheet and average the rods if you have a mind to do so. The new values can easily be pasted into a new rod for comparison to either of the originals.  (Larry Blan)